By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog

Elder Haight passed away this morning of causes related to old age. When I mentioned his death to my mother she asked me if I was sure he wasn’t just taken up. Read the rest of this entry »

Because you were looking for something fun to do on a Friday afternoon.

An increasing portion of our traffic here at BCC has been via Google searches that include the term “rumspringa.”  For example, a search for “rumspringa amish biography” shows BCC solidly in fifth place.  Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of Mormon women make nifty scrapbooks of their kids’, their family’s lives. I don’t. Sometimes I feel bad about that, worry that my kids will feel deprived if all the events of their young lives are not recorded in carefully cropped snapshots, with cute die-cut figures and fancy paper borders. For a long time I thought my resistance to scrapbooking was just mild anti-Mollyism combined with a lack of time (oh, yeah, and resentment of turning nouns like “scrapbook” into verbs). Read the rest of this entry »

Patty Henetz of the Associated Press has written an article on DNA and the Book of Mormon, focusing on geneticist Simon Southerton and his forthcoming book, Losing a Lost Tribe. Although DNA and the Book of Mormon has probably made the rounds through the bloggernacle, I suspect it’s a story that won’t go away for a while. I find the DNA issue to be fascinating, though hardly the death knell for the Book of Mormon that some portray it as. But I had an experience sometime ago that both troubled me and helped me resolve many of these issues, albeit perhaps unsatisfactorily for most members.

After hearing about the Zelph story here and there, and remembering it when I read History of the Church on my mission, I decided to do some digging. As a quick reminder, the Zelph story goes as follows: While on Zion’s camp, some bones are unearthed on top of a small mound. Joseph Smith declares that the man was Zelph, a white Lamanite and a righteous man.

I expected to hear that the Zelph story couldn’t be taken seriously as an actual event – it was just a rumor. It turns out at least 7 or 8 people present at the camp reported on Zelph, including Wilford Woodruff. President Woodruff recorded in his journal that Joseph had a revelation, and that he learned that Zelph was a warrior under the great Prophet Onandagus. After doing my reading, I came away pretty convinced that the Zelph episode did in fact take place.

The first problem with this story is immediately evident. If Joseph had a revelation about Zelph, what does that mean for the limited geography theory? If the Book of Mormon took place, as we’re now told, in a small area in Mesoamerica, how did Zelph’s bones end up on a mound in Illinois? For whatever reason, that didn’t affect me too much. What surprised me, to the point where I had what might be called an epiphany, was reading about this great Prophet Onandagus that Zelph served under. I served my mission in upstate New York – just slightly east of Palmyra. One of the areas I served in was Onandaga County, one county over from where Joseph Smith lived. Coincidence? I think not.

I know it probably seems silly, but this information struck me hard. Rarely have a felt so sure of something: Joseph Smith was making stuff up. I’d always been able to negotiate my doubts and my faith without making scriptures, particularly the Book of Mormon, a casualty. It seemed now I couldn’t even keep the most basic parts of my faith safe from my Sunstone side. Since this experience, I’ve calmed down, chilled out – relaxed a bit, if you will. The reality is I don’t know what the Zelph story means. I see several possibilities:

1. The Zelph affair never happened. One or two men saw Joseph looking at the bones on a mound, told some of the other men, a story got cooked up and passed on as truth. Or, Joseph speculated a bit, and it was reported as revelation. (For the record, I think this is highly unlikely. The consistency and specifics with which the men report the event are impressive.)

2. The Zelph affair did happen, and Joseph did have a revelation. The limited geography theory is simply wrong, or flawed, and Lamanites and Nephites did live in what is now Illinois, despite what current research and science suggests.

3. The Zelph affair did happen, and Joseph did have a revelation. However, the bones were actually not that of Zelph, but this event was a way for God to strengthen those who were in his service in Zion’s camp. They may have been feeling down and out, and this boosted their spirits. The theological implications of God revealing something that isn’t true are problematic, but I also think this possibility need remain open.

4. The Zelph affair did happen, but Joseph received no revelation. Instead, he made it up to boost the men’s spirits and remind them of the divinity of their mission. This does not necessarily invalidate the Book of Mormon, but suggests that Joseph was willing to lie to help people.

5. The Zelph affair did happen, but Joseph received no revelation. He not only made this story up, but made the entire Book of Mormon up. He was, as Dan Vogel might suggest, a pious fraud.

I’ll confess I’m partial to number 4. (I’ve left off a few other variations on these possibilities, such as Joseph was delusional.) What this experience forced me to do, for the first time, was look at what I valued in the scriptures. I was guilty of what a lot of us are guilty of – I paid lip service to things I didn’t really believe. We say that we don’t try and prove the Book of Mormon true, because we’re really only interested in its spiritual message and witness of Christ. But how do we react when it’s veracity as a historical book is challenged? FARMS, for example, will spend one paragraph in a book saying that the spiritual witness the Book of Mormon provides is what’s important, and that we can’t prove it to be true, then they spend the rest of the entire book trying to do just that.

We’ve tied so much into the Book of Mormon (if it’s true, then Joseph’s a prophet, and if he’s a prophet, then Mormonism is true, yada, yada, yada.) For my part, I’m learning to appreciate the book as a wonderful spiritual guide, regardless of its origins. I find I enjoy the New Testament a bit more (as if that doesn’t have its own historical dilemmas), but for the first time in a while, I’ve learned to read the Book of Mormon without the baggage we’ve attached to it. It’s really quite remarkable.

I read in the Rochester and Democrat and Chronicle this afternoon that prominent businessman and devout Mormon Kay Whitmore passed away last night after a struggle with leukemia. It’s only by chance that I read it in the paper before I heard it over the phone; he happened to be a member of my ward. Read the rest of this entry »

I realize that in the company of the intellectual giants in the bloggernacle, this next confession may forever peg me as a lightweight (if my previous posts have not already pegged me as such…) I watch reality dating shows. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may know, I’m a lawyer, and draft contracts and other arrangements for a living.  Another way of looking at this is to say that I’m a bottom-feeder, and my job would not exist if people were honest with each other.  Read the rest of this entry »

is available here.  Not a bad tune, either.

As noted on the LDS.org site, Elder Maxwell passed away last night.  I will miss him, as one of the most thoughtful and well-spoken apostles in recent memory.  His thoughts on the meaning of discipleship, the hallmark of his tenure as apostle, were of personal importance to me and to many others.  Our thoughts are with wife and children.

Steve asked what I’m going to say on the Sunstone panel. I really don’t quite know; I *told* Dan Wotherspoon that I wasn’t sure I had much to offer, so they’ve been forewarned. (I’ll try to at least wear something interesting, so I can be decorative). Read the rest of this entry »

The annual Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium is three weeks away, so it’s time I started spreading the word. I’ll just mention a few things:

1. The program is online in pdf format at www.sunstoneonline.com. Do check it out. Note that students with a valid ID can attend for free and first time attenders are $50 for the whole conference. (Make sure to look over the workshops – Linda King Newell teaching a writing biography workshop – not too shabby!)

2. One panel in particular I’ll mention is session 233 – Internet Mormons vs. Chapel Mormons. Kristine Haglund Harris will join others on this panel that discusses if there is a disconnect between those Mormons who are familiar with online forums, and those who are not. For example, those familiar with Internet forums and websites will tend to accept a much smaller body of canon (ie, not everything said or written by Church leaders is doctrine) – do those unfamiliar with online forums agree?

3. Dallas Robbins, at his website here, outlines some criticisms of the symposium. I’d be curious to hear what others think of his criticisms and if they have suggestions for improvement. I’ve posted some followup questions on his site and would love ideas from all places.

Once upon a time, I politely suggested we change the name of this site to “Zeezrom and the Kori-Whores.” Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled across an interesting set of directives to Catholic voters entitled A Brief Catechism for Catholic Voters. It’s written by a Catholic clergyman with a PhD and it’s posted on a website that looks pretty darned Catholic, so I’ll take it as a fair expression of conservative Catholic thinking on this tricky issue of church and state. Mormons, too, like to mix religion with their politics, but sometimes we see our own difficulties more clearly by viewing someone else’s. Read the rest of this entry »

After the Federal Marriage Amendment failed to gather enough support to put it to a vote, Senator Hatch had the following to say:

“If Massachusetts starts honoring gay marriage, that means a state like my home state that doesn’t want to have gay marriage has to honor them,” said Hatch. “Virtually every constitutional authority I know of thinks the full faith and credit clause [in the Constitution] will require recognition of gay marriages.” Read the rest of this entry »

Over at the Evil Blog, those raving, intellectual apostates have finally gone too far. Brace yourselves–Russell has had the audacity to promote khaki pants for missionaries! Scandalous! Outrageous! I’m not sure I can visit T&S anymore. Steve, remove the heathens from our blogroll, forthwith!

What Russell obviously doesn’t know is that non-black and non-navy pants aren’t just prohibited in many missions–they are downright evil.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m starting to think I’m extremely naïve. There’s something I believe that seems like it ought to be the most obvious fact on the planet. “Two plus two equals four” or “the sky is blue” kind of obvious – the sort of thing everyone ought to know.

But it turns out not everyone does know it. And the many people that do know it have long ago made peace with it – it’s just not the issue to them that it is to me. I bring it up online or in group discussions, thinking I’m somehow shining some light in the world. In reality, I’m starting to think I’m embarrassing myself, playing the role of the “master of the obvious.” So, with that in mind, here goes.

It seems to me that something that ought be understood by all religious people, something that ought to be as plain as the nose on one’s face, is that religious beliefs aren’t facts. They’re called “beliefs” for a reason. We don’t really know that the Bible is the word of God – we believe it is. We don’t have a scrap of proof or evidence to back us up. We believe God is out there, we don’t know God is out there.

Yes, people have spiritual, supernatural, or other-wordly experiences that seem to confirm the truth of these sorts of things. But these experiences, when taken from across the religious spectrum, are so diverse, so numerous, and so contradictory as to make them almost useless in determining truth. Not that individual experiences are worthless, but that using them to compile an idea of what truth is strikes me as pointless. For example, I’ve had some remarkable experiences in paying tithing. I’ve experienced things that I label as blessings, and I assign those blessings as having come from the Mormon concept of God. Those experiences are very real to me and I hope people will respect them. But that tells me that I have to respect the experiences of others. If someone else experiences blessings and traces those blessings to Vishnu, how on earth can I tell them they are wrong and that their blessings really come from my concept of what God is.

I remain entirely amazed at what people will do in the name of their religious beliefs, given that there is no way of proving they are somehow “right.” Beyond one’s own religious tradition, how does one choose Christ over Buddha, for example? Perhaps one tradition will ring truer with one’s personal experiences, but it isn’t like someone can demonstrate that Christ is the true way, while Buddha isn’t.

This “fact” seems so obvious to me, and so very important. If understood by all, it means the guys won’t fly the plane into the buildings. In short, it means (at least as I see it) that people don’t need to mistreat other people over religion, because they realize we’re talking about ideas and beliefs, not truth. Because when someone thinks they have the truth, they can justify anything – everything from religious violence to just being plain mean. Lonnie Persifall (an anti-Mormon preacher in Salt Lake) can call Mormon women “whores of babylon” while professing to love them, because he has “the truth.”

But few others seem interested in this “obvious idea”. When brought up among true believers, I’m usually seen as weird or even influenced by Satan (this logic is exactly the kind Satan would use to fight the truth, they reason). When brought up among the more intellectually minded (for lack of a better term), I seem to be regarded like the little kid who just figured out something obvious. They’ve dealt with this issue, and have decided to live their lives following their own faith. And yet I continue to contend that this kind of understanding essential to a peaceful, tolerant religious community.

For what it’s worth, I’m not trying to make belief a morally relativistic place where truth is everywhere yet nowhere. I believe in exercising faith – acting on one’s belief. That’s why I go to Church, obey the commandments as best I can, etc. Belief isn’t worth a lot unless it has action to back it up.

Am I being naïve in feeling this way? Am I watering down religion to nothing (and making it boring along the way)?

In the comments at my recent post at Sons of Mosiah, Grasshopper shared his fond memories of “streaking” through the halls of the MTC with nothing on but a shower cap, and the accompanying brush with ecclesiastical authority that ensued. He says he learned some lessons that have served him well. Not to be outdone, I also have an MTC experience that involves a ruckus through the MTC halls and an ecclesiastical confrontation, although it contains no nudity (alas!). (I hope all you Mormon liberals don’t mind my longwindedness …)
Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably read about this elsewhere, but the U.S. Air Force pilot who killed four and wounded at least eight Canadians in Afghanistan has been fined $5,672. This article provides a fairly good summary of the decision. Personally, I’m disgusted that criminal charges against him were dropped, and that all he gets is the ‘maximum’ administrative penalty of about a month’s pay, along with a reprimand. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t worry, we won’t tell your old AP what your reply was . . .

So here’s a simple question, for which I failed to come up with a satisfactory answer during 8 weeks of several-times-daily hikes to the top of the stairs in the Lee Library last summer(I thought that if I took the elevator, people would realize more quickly that I was pushing a matronly 35 and not a bouncy coed… women can be silly that way):

Doctrine & Covenants 88:118 is prefaced with “And as all have not faith…” Read the rest of this entry »

This article printed in today’s Washington Post outlines the Bush/Cheney election team’s attempt to mobilize its religious base. The article outlines strategies sent to Bush supporters to help those supporters involve their congregations in the Bush campaign. The suggested “goals” include turning over membership lists to the campaign, organizing voter registration drives, and hosting partisan pot-luck dinners. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, let’s settle this once and for all.

[Note: This was a poll asking about what exactly polygamy was all about.]